HI everybody, Here is an update on the Lancaster, MA project which started yesterday. I showed up around 10:30 AM and two other fellows from Holy Cross came to join me. They left around 5 PM and I stayed until about 7 PM. We installed additional hard drive in two machines onto which we installed SuSE Linux. The installation went smoothly, as did the X windows configuration. The problems started with the networking. Mixing ISA and PCI cards in a system is problematic. I have discovered the hard way that the motherboard picks the PCI card interrupts, and if they interfere with the ISA card, too bad! Some motherboards allow you to exclude interrupts from being used by the PCI cards - some don't. At least the really old ISA cards had jumpers so you *knew* which interrupt it wanted...the "new" ISA cards don't even have this, so you're doubly screwed. The systems both had ISA NICs. We eventually got one of them working (perhaps by accident). I finally swapped out the other one for a PCI NIC which worked almost immediately. I played with Coyote Linux on the old 486SX with 16 MB of memory after we had performed a memory upgrade and a proper CDROM drive installation. Coyote Linux appears to be a continuation of the work started by the Linux Router project. Its benefits are that it fits on a single floppy, appears to be more up to date than LRP, and is definitely easier to configure. After playing with the modem jumpers and after shutting off the motherboard COM ports, I was able to get Coyote Linux running, pinging the local network, and dialing the ISP on demand. In short, it was acting properly as a router for the other two Linux machines - yipee! Our host had quite a spread for us at lunchtime consisting of broccoli quiche, chips and hot sauce, soda, and more! My thanks to Neel and Ryan (from Holy Cross) for coming to help out, and to Warren (our host) for a great lunch and for asking for our help. I expect that we'll be taking another trip to Lancaster in about a month to install CUPS, perhaps SAMBA, configure two printers and a scanner, enable full access from all machines to those printers, to enable a packet filtering firewall on the 486, and to insure that everything else is in proper working order. Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org
Good to see things went well at latest project. Hopefully I'll make the next one. It's also great to see some fellow Crusaders hacking it up. =) --Track (HC '99) -----Original Message----- From: wlug-admin@mail.wlug.org [mailto:wlug-admin@mail.wlug.org]On Behalf Of Andy Stewart Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2001 5:30 PM To: wlug@mail.wlug.org Cc: nsmith@holycross.edu; wrlinx@yahoo.com Subject: [Wlug] Lancaster Project update HI everybody, Here is an update on the Lancaster, MA project which started yesterday. I showed up around 10:30 AM and two other fellows from Holy Cross came to join me. They left around 5 PM and I stayed until about 7 PM. We installed additional hard drive in two machines onto which we installed SuSE Linux. The installation went smoothly, as did the X windows configuration. The problems started with the networking. Mixing ISA and PCI cards in a system is problematic. I have discovered the hard way that the motherboard picks the PCI card interrupts, and if they interfere with the ISA card, too bad! Some motherboards allow you to exclude interrupts from being used by the PCI cards - some don't. At least the really old ISA cards had jumpers so you *knew* which interrupt it wanted...the "new" ISA cards don't even have this, so you're doubly screwed. The systems both had ISA NICs. We eventually got one of them working (perhaps by accident). I finally swapped out the other one for a PCI NIC which worked almost immediately. I played with Coyote Linux on the old 486SX with 16 MB of memory after we had performed a memory upgrade and a proper CDROM drive installation. Coyote Linux appears to be a continuation of the work started by the Linux Router project. Its benefits are that it fits on a single floppy, appears to be more up to date than LRP, and is definitely easier to configure. After playing with the modem jumpers and after shutting off the motherboard COM ports, I was able to get Coyote Linux running, pinging the local network, and dialing the ISP on demand. In short, it was acting properly as a router for the other two Linux machines - yipee! Our host had quite a spread for us at lunchtime consisting of broccoli quiche, chips and hot sauce, soda, and more! My thanks to Neel and Ryan (from Holy Cross) for coming to help out, and to Warren (our host) for a great lunch and for asking for our help. I expect that we'll be taking another trip to Lancaster in about a month to install CUPS, perhaps SAMBA, configure two printers and a scanner, enable full access from all machines to those printers, to enable a packet filtering firewall on the 486, and to insure that everything else is in proper working order. Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug
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Andy Stewart -
Track